A Five Year Sentence Read Free Page A

happened.’
    Tuesday’s entry was exactly the same, and so was Wednesday’s, except that the meal times were omitted. But every day, ‘nothing happened’. The following week was blank but for the Monday when she had merely recorded getting up. Thereafter the pages were empty as if even the appetite to inscribe ‘nothing happened’ had deserted her. In fact, after the first week of her retirement, Miss Hawkins had largely stayed in bed as a simple solution to day-swallowing. But on the sixth day, the primal needs of hunger drove her out to view the empty bread-bin and jampot. It was a moment of decision. One way of dying was not to eat, and one way of fasting was not to buy food. It would be a slow and painful demise, but not slow enough to span the five blackmailing years her former colleagues had given her. The diary lay locked on the kitchen table. She opened it resignedly and flicked through the empty week that the bed had swallowed and the two thousand or so pages that had somehow to be converted into eventful vocabulary. Her stomach rumbled and, picking up a pencil, she scrawled angrily across the current page, ‘Went to buy food’, and quickly she dressed and went out to obey the diary’s order.
    As she shopped, sparingly now, because she was mindful of her reduced income, she was surprised at her sudden feeling of well-being, and she remarked to herself on her sprightly step. She paused at the bacon counter to try and analyse this sudden change of heart, and falteringly she ascribed it to the diary’scommand. She was obeying and that was just like being at work. She had retired from her colleagues, from a nine-to-five discipline, from a regular canteen three-courser, from the punctual elevenses, but above all she had retired from obedience, and it was that that she regretted and missed most of all. ‘Oh what fun,’ she said to the bacon, and those who passed her thought, Poor woman, she spends too much time on her own. When Miss Hawkins heard her own voice, she realised that they were the first words she had spoken in over a week. She tried her voice again, and again to the bacon with which she felt a secure familiarity. ‘You’ve gone up again,’ she said reprovingly. Her voice squeaked as if it needed oiling. I must talk a little more, she said to herself, and she decided that thereafter she would read aloud to keep her voice in trim, just in case one day she would wish to use it for communication. It was the first time since her retirement that she had consciously envisaged a future. She was in a hurry now to go home and tick off the diary’s command. She finished off her shopping, buying only as much as she needed for that day. Tomorrow and every day, the diary would order her to the shops again. She began to sing softly to herself, and when she reached home, she ticked the order with a red crayon. She had obeyed, and she trembled with the thrill of subordination. It was natural then, that she should think of giving herself daily orders, so that her diary would concern itself with her future rather than with her past which had proved so lamentably uneventful. This decision excited her, and bold now, she took the pencil and inscribed, ‘Went for a long walk.’
    She made herself a filling, if not nutritious breakfast, then took to the streets again. She had been ordered a long walk, so long it had to be. Not far from her street, there was a park, and although she’d lived in her little flat for over twenty years, she had never actually walked inside it. On her way to work each morning, she had passed it in the bus, and the layout of the park had always intrigued her. It lay behind a small church, and because of that, half the park was taken up as cemetery. The other was a children’s playground, surrounded by lawns and trees. The swings and slides stood adjacent to the graves, asclose as lovers, with no concession of a rail or a fence